The 'No-Speculation' Rule (for the overthinking founder)

Hey Rob, good to see you, man.

How you doing?

Good. Uh, we've got some exciting stuff coming up with, uh, with you, with, uh, you've got your, your next round of, uh, the artist formerly known as, uh, PMF Camp. We're gonna, uh, now rebranding to, uh, Go-To-Market Accelerator. So we're gonna be having that for founders. We've got some, uh, team stuff. We got, you know, have had some folks reach out about, uh, trying to get their teams up to speed. And so we're developing some resources, maybe an experience for team members. Anything, uh, anything you'd add there on ideas you have in the works?

Um, let's see, we're, we're basically just trying to launch the things that people want and, um, the things that they are pulled for. So if there are things that you're like, hey, you guys should totally be doing X, I, my team needs X right now, or I need X right now, reach out, let us know. The things, so we have a thing for founders, they call it kind of like live go-to-market accelerator. We have a thing for teams when you want to kind of red pill your teams. We get a lot of things like, yeah, I get it. I just can't, I, for some reason, can't get my teams to do it. And then there's also AI Rob, which is still in kind of like limited beta testing, but that is more for like, hey, I've read your stuff. I've tried to apply your frameworks myself, but I want to go back and forth, you know, on my outbound message or on my sales call script or on, you know, I want feedback on these things. And so that is, again, that is coming. It's probably going to change names because AI Rob is the height of arrogance, but we will, we will, but there's just, there's stuff cooking, I'll say.

Yeah, awesome. And I'll leave my email in the show notes, is rc@reframeb2b.com. And if there's something that's on your mind, just drop me an email and we can either chat about it or find a few minutes. You know, another one that came up yesterday talking with the founder was working with the board of directors and like bringing their board along and like figuring out how do I communicate since my thinking has changed to be demand-oriented and have some board members that are not there quite yet. So there's probably broader applications and we're just trying to figure out like what's going on with founders that we can develop that's going to be helpful. And then with them like implementing and making progress. Well, today we're talking about the no speculation rule, which for, you've got two champion overthinking founders here between Rob Snyder and myself. And this one is the antidote for overthinking. This might have been a little bit of self-therapy for Rob Snyder on this one, but Rob, why don't you give us what's the context? Why is this one on your mind?

So I just always in the constant battle against overthinking. And I think both of us being MBA types, which is like we are generally interested in business and deeply interested in all the different pieces of business. Then, you know, if you've been good at school or whatever, you've tended to like think a lot about things. And so this is something that I struggle with. And I know every, like half the people who reach out to me are like, you said overthinker once 10 years ago or whatever. And I've been following you ever since. And so I just keep hearing the thing about overthinking and I've been struggling with it as I've been trying to build AI, Rob Snyder. And figure out what that is. It's just been an interesting exercise in, and just putting myself through mental torture to try to figure, as I try to figure this out. And this post is about setting rules for yourself about topics that are off limits to think about because they, and they are unhealthy. To think about because they are unanswerable. They will waste a ton of your mental energy and they will prevent you from figuring out what actually works.

Yeah. Let's talk about that, that third one.

Why—

may actually, before getting to that, you talked early again, like one of the things you said to me, like probably 5 years ago is when you were going through all these books of, you know, you were just tearing through the anthology of like business knowledge. And also getting kind of like going off the beaten path to just like, I don't know, it's like not the kind of stuff that HBR would publish. It was, it was like the stuff that was written by people who had just sold stuff and you were like, there's so much value that are, that are in. And it's like the instinct of on one side is like frameworks and, uh, like theory. And on the other side was just like sell. And, and, and, you know, that, that contrast was one that I was thinking about while I was reading this week's post.

But Rob Snyder, there's a quote there before, there's like a quote from Bob Mesta that just like sits in the back of my mind, which is like, A students don't start until they know what they're doing. C students or D students start because they don't know what they're doing. Right. And the difference there is, is basically, you know, like I had read all of the, I basically read all of the business books. And then I went and read the like get rich quick things. And then I've read stuff on architecture and all this other stuff from people who do things. And the gap couldn't be wider between these two sets of kind of like theories and the people who do the like get rich quick stuff. Yeah, there's like a, there is some middle ground between the two of these, which is like doing while learning is, but not like delaying doing until you know.

Yeah. And the third thing that you mentioned there was that it prevents you from doing valuable things. Why does, why do you see it as, you know, speculating as the, you know, anti-doing or like, what is it in there that prevents you from making progress while you're doing that?

Well, it's just like your, so think of your calendar. And think of how much time on your calendar, if you're being honest with yourself, is empty on your calendar and spent like thinking or planning or like thinking about planning or planning about thinking, like stuff like that. Like, and so think of just the calendar blocks that are spent on that, but then also think about while you are doing something, how much of your energy, your mental energy is actually spent doing the thing versus background processing, a bunch of speculation type things about, well, but what about, what about da da da da da, like all these other things. My sense is that with the overthinking founder, AKA you and me, a solid 80% of time is that is not in a meeting or like actively doing something is spent on like thinking about things that should be off limits to think about. And then somewhere between 50 and 80% of the time during a meeting, as we're talking right now, I know you're going in your mind and you're like, but what about blank blank? You're going there. Half of your mental processing power is there.

Rob Snyder, 100% of my mental processing power is on you, but it's just, it's half the mental processing power, unfortunately, of what everybody else brings. So it's deceiving, but there's, you know, there's 3 things that you highlight that are common areas that we spend speculating. One is the future. One is what makes, excuse me, what might be true in the present. And the third is abstractions. Why don't we hit those real quick? And I want to hit not just like what they are, but like why they are not valuable to think about and what to do instead. So starting about the future, you give this example, which part of the AI value chain will be defensible in the future? You know, another one actually that I heard on a podcast, like a really a super popular tech podcast, like last week was, why do you have a right to exist in 10 years?, and this one was, you know, it was, it was coming from a VC perspective. And so like these kinds of questions are all over the place in, in startup space. Um, you know, why are they, uh, do you not have to think about this stuff? Like why, why should you not be thinking about it?

So how could you know what's going to happen in the future? Like the future is a sequence of, we, we just can't know. It's that, it's that simple. One of our, one of our good friends reached out to me. He was considering taking a job at a startup, going from consulting into a startup. And he was like, how do I know if the startup's going to be successful or not? I was like, I don't know. Like how, how that's, you can't know that. Like that's, that's impossible to know in advance, you know, right? Like there's, there is, there are things you might be able to guess, but there's always something that might be more important. That you haven't thought about. That's the relevant variable in the future. And so what tends to happen when you think about the future, when you think about big questions like these, is you spend a lot of time thinking about them and you come up with a coherent answer in that time that guides your decision-making in the present in a way that doesn't work in the present.

Hmm.

This is behind a lot of the startup sales pitches that I see that because you're thinking about the future and your vision for how the world should work, which puts a bunch of crap into your sales pitch that doesn't work in the present. It convinces people not to buy in the present, but at the very least, it's just time you could spend figuring out what works in the present.

Yeah.

And it's just like, not, it's, it's a, again, all of this stuff seems really important. It's great to like debate over drinks in Silicon Valley because you don't do anything else, right? Like, or, or whatever. But, but these are, these aren't knowable things.

Let me give, let me give a, a two, like, yeah, but, and, and see what you do with these. One is feels like if you're, if you're in the process of fundraising, like you're going to run into that question, something about the future for VC, and then, you know, from VCs that are considering investing? And then two, um, what if you are working on technology that's emerging? Maybe it's coming out of a lab or you're in R&D, like what, like why, why in those cases do you not, you know, why is it not worth it to think about the future?

Yeah. Okay. If you're raising from VCs and you need to have an answer, then have an answer, but keep the, I wrote like a decade ago or half a decade ago about the two boxes, right? There's the box to fundraise. There's the box to build a company. The box and the key to your sanity is never mixing the two boxes, never conflating that these two, the things in each box are, are, are, um, are different. Keep them separate. That's thing one. Then thing two is if you're working on an emerging technology, if you're going to spend 5 years of your life in a lab building on and building some emerging technology, you want to make sure there is demand right now. Somebody who would buy that at this very moment, there might be a small group and you say, Well, I don't know, maybe other people will buy it in the future. We will see, right? Like that's essentially the kind of like Microsoft thing where their initial target customer was one person. Uh, and it was just the first guy who made the Altair. Okay. That's our, that's our first person. And then maybe like, I think other people will probably build more, but who knows? We'll see.

Yeah. All right. Let's hit this, this second bucket. Uh, what might be true? You know, the first one that you write is the most common what might be true pattern is connecting dots on behalf of our potential customer that they did not themselves connect. And you also write it as like auto-completing their sentences. And, you know, this would save us $10 million or, you know, we use— talking about after they've purchased your product, we use it every day and get a ton of value out of it and then auto-completing those two to be therefore I will buy it or therefore I will not churn. Um, why is this speculation? And it feels like it's like, you know, the thing about the future is almost like you can, you can recognize like, oh, I'm speculating. When you're autocompleting a sentence, it's almost like rewriting your brain to be, uh, way more literal or, or something. It's like it is requiring a different standard there. Um, but how do you work with, you know, where do you see founders do that? Maybe you could expand on those examples. And how do you help founders and yourself, like, not do that? Like, change that mode of thinking?

Yeah, I mean, so this is just like a— I've called this no independent processing before, which is— it is— this is all— I think the word literal is a really good one. This is just all about becoming exceptionally literal about what's happening right now. What are they saying? What are they not saying? And not pretending that because they say something, you know what the next thing they're going to say is. Or you know what they mean. And so we tend, especially like overthinkers, smart people, tend to like finish each other's sentences in our head and like move on. But the way that we do that, so the classic example is someone said, wow, this would save us a bunch of money. In your mind, you autocomplete that to, therefore I will buy it. Or therefore I want to buy it, or they're like, which those things were not said. And so when you autocomplete, there's going to be a different thing. You're basically creating something in your head that might be true.

Yeah.

But it's not actually true. And so that's off limits. And so this is another thing where like, I'll review a sales call with somebody and they'll say, well, what they meant there was blank. And I was like, you don't know that. How would you know that? They didn't explicitly say it. And so these are all ways where we create fake realities of how we interpret things when the answer is just, okay, cool. Does that save you money? But like, do you actually need to buy it?

Really?

Like you cannot connect dots that customers have not connected for you.

Yeah. That's interesting. Like you've talked about this in the past as like playing stupid. You know, and which is something I think about. Also something you just mentioned about reviewing sales calls. When I review my calls, one of the questions I'm asking myself is like, what should I ask? What did I assume there that I should have made explicit and like brought to light to actually test? You give a couple other examples. One is looking at competitors' websites and fundraising and social posts to try to guess what matters. Doing basically any kind of whiteboarding and brainstorming, pontificating about what logically makes sense. Like they should want to make money, shouldn't they? You know, like these bring some questions to mind, like what types of competitor research is helpful?

Yeah, the kind of competitor research that would actually be helpful is one, in your own sales calls. Like seeing how people who are at that decision point are thinking about the competition in the market when they bring it up. That's one. Second is interviewing people who have bought from competitors to understand how they made that decision and how they thought about their options. And at that point in time, like that's, those things are interesting and understanding basically what we're trying to do is we're trying to understand the decision process of customers in the moment when they are making these decisions. If you just look at a competitor's website, you don't know if someone is buying because or despite what they're talking about on their website. If you see that a competitor is growing fast, you don't know what is causing them to grow fast versus what is preventing them from growing fast. And so, like, You, and they might not know either. Right. And so you have to do the kind of like firsthand analysis there, which is done by understanding people who are making or have made a purchase decision.

Yeah.

And there is no other place you can find that information.

Yeah. If I, if I think about, um, like some of the examples we've discussed or like what I've put into presentations that led to sales that was just like totally wrong, but if somebody would have, uh, you know, would have would've read the presentation and thought like, oh, that's the thing. But it was actually like totally either irrelevant or counterproductive. You know, what would you say, when is it speculation, you know, boo, and when is it like organizing your thoughts or developing a hypothesis? Like when, you know, you write about don't like stay away from the whiteboard. If you've got a whiteboard in your office or in your house, just like throw it out the window or something. Yeah, get rid of it. But like when is it valuable to do some, you know, there's some thinking that has to go into this and when is it, when does it like cross that chasm to become, uh, uh, yeah, to become speculative?

Um, so a good example is the Paul hypothesis. When you're crafting a Paul hypothesis, are you basing it on a real person or not? If you're basing it on a person you wish to exist, or you're just kind of like reasoning to it, um, then right, you are you are starting from an abstract place. You're starting from kind of first principle. You're starting from these places that aren't real. And so, uh, like that's the danger there. And then, right, like as you're, as you're organizing your thoughts or whatever, it just, you just always have to kind of like have this no speculation rule in your mind because that's a very dangerous place to find yourself, right? Just like when you're at the whiteboard, you are untethered from reality. And so you always have to have that, like, you have to be touching grass. You have to, you have to have reality be the source there. Otherwise you get lost. I was actually talking to a startup that's raised a ton of money that's growing very fast. And they're thinking about different market directions that they could go in there. And for them, it was coming from their VCs and they were doing this abstract reasoning exercise. And that the, like, almost certainly was going to kill them because the answer was already in their customer data. And if you think that the answers can be found out there or by pontificating, by going to the whiteboard, by reasoning from first principles, you're going to by default be wrong because there's some, like, just that abstract reasoning starting from the whiteboard, it almost can't be right.

Yeah. Or when it is, it's accidentally, uh, accidentally right is one way you've talked about it in the past.

Function of massive, massive luck.

Yeah. You know, you've just bridged into the final one, which is abstractions. Um, you know, one thing you write here is, uh, when creating abstractions, we speculate about what might be relevant to individuals, which leads us to create a hypothetical being who always happens to love our product or be in a situation where they, you know, where they're just excited to purchase it. Like there's like an element of optimism that seems to be built into the abstractions that we create. And this is actually a quick plug for your book, Rob Snyder. This is one of my favorite sections that you wrote about in the book and the way that you use the, you know, the Frankenstein analogy, which you've written about on your blog. In the past, you, you know, you take pieces and you create something that's, it's sort of like weirdly recognizable as a human being, but it's not a human being. And you know, it's not who you end up selling to. But, um, tell us, uh, can you tell us here, like, uh, is this only for personas? Are there other instances in which abstractions, uh, show up or anything you would add, uh, there?

Yeah, I'd say like another, another thing I see very commonly is like startups that are doing product-led growth. So like self-serve, they look at the data and, and try to make decisions based on the data that they are seeing of website visits, signups, kind of like product usage, all that kind of stuff. And that just answer is not there. It can't be there. You, you have to actually understand the, the anecdote because something is lost in the abstraction. And the abstraction, like you start taking the data as sources of truth or as a source of truth. And so that's any kind of form of abstraction. The common one is the persona one where we create a persona that we, that no matter what we do when we create a persona, no matter how hard we try, the persona always reflects what we want to exist and what we want to be relevant from individuals. And so that's why like the personas make sense in theory and like just are not useful in practice and they lead to all this kind of stuff. So, um, but yeah, data is another version of that where it's like, I am going to, I am going to figure this out by any means other than actually interacting one-on-one with customers to understand the anecdotes. And then, then what I'll do is I'll say, what, like, what are the spiky anecdotes that represent the others? And I'm just going to design for those.

Yeah. So, okay. Let's, let's just take an, or bring this to life a little bit. Like, how would you, let's say we're designing a product. You've done, you know, you've done, you have your pull hypothesis, you've done your 5 interviews, and you're trying to extrapolate, like, what do I do? About this? How do you talk about the 5 interviews? How do you talk about the pro— you're gonna be selling the product to more than one person. So, you know, what do you do? How do you have that conversation either internally or externally as you're making sense of it?

Yeah, I just think of it as you're crafting the one repeatable case study. And so for me, what you don't do is you don't jumble together a bunch of different pieces of case studies to create one abstract case study that covers all of them. So again, AI Rob, we've been, I've been having people use AI Rob. People have been signing up and paying for AI Rob and using it. I've been talking to them about how they are using it when they had the aha moment, right? And we've had a couple of very specific examples that are different from each other. And so one thing I can do, so one person used it for their outbound and they were able to go from like They, they booked more meeting outbound meetings in 2 days than they had in the past, like month and a half after like doing the outbound thing. That's cool. Another person had used it for reviewing their deals, like individual deals, and they realized that they had been targeting the wrong kind of person the entire time. And there were a couple other things that they realized that led them to change their approach to their sales calls and to who they were targeting. Right. So those are two separate kinds of case studies. If I combine those two into a thing that's like, fix your go-to-market, that's like, technically that's a superset. That's an abstraction of the two cases. And in practice, that's not going to make sense to anybody. That's not going to, it's not going to speak to anybody. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, any other like rules of thumb, um, or, you know, tips that you give people to like when they, when they feel the gravity of the, you know, thinking in a persona or an abstraction that can like bring them back down into the present or real. Yeah.

So I always just go back to like, look at your factory metrics and just attack whatever the current bottleneck is and do that. And you can kind of like, I mean, I'm, I'm not sure whether think speculating is ever useful. You can like schedule it Friday afternoons when you're fried and, or just like want to think about the future, want to go into the weekend, whatever. But like, you look, what I've found is especially overthinkers, you have to schedule your overthinking time and the speculation bounds here will just tell, just treat those things as off limits and always go back to like, okay, what is the factory? What's the factory metrics telling me? The bottleneck is what do I need to do to attack the bottleneck? And then what am I hearing from actual customers, potential customers? Like, what are they saying? And how do I, how do I kind of repeat more of that? And how do I just, like, how do I do the least amount of transformation from what they are saying to what I am doing?

Yeah, that's, that's funny. It's like, like eliminate processed foods from your diet. It's like eliminate processed customers from your, your hypotheses. Um, another, I think Reading through this post, I was like, wow, there's like elements of mindfulness that Rob Snyder has in kind of a Zen way, like worked into this. Like maybe I just need to focus on my breathing and that'll bring me back to, I need to solve for Stanley and not solve for like 100 different Stanleys that are actually not Stanley. Rob Snyder, why don't we leave this one pretty soon? Anything else that's on your mind or any tips to put this into practice or takeaways?

Yeah, it's just, so I, so what I've found is that like, be present is not a useful guide to anything because it's like, yeah, cool, great. That sounds great. It's a positive rule. And what I'm focused on is the negative space of that rule, which are like, what are the things explicitly that by eliminating focusing on these, you will be left with just focusing on what matters. And so that is, it turns out that is a rule for like focusing on startups. It's like a really, really useful thing. For, especially for the overthinkers who want to think about everything and want to understand how everything fits together. It's like, no, I can only focus on this right now. And I'm only going to focus on this, like this layer here. I'm not going to focus on the abstract, the abstract future possible. I'm going to focus on the like demonstrated real customer now. But that also does like flow through to your life. So like if you're at dinner or if you're out somewhere, and you find your kind of like mind is going somewhere, um, uh, that where like you're not able to be in that moment, it turns, it's almost always one of these different things. It's almost always you're thinking about the future. You're thinking about what might be true. It's like, and so if you just axe those things out and try to, try to just like cleave them out, you will probably find that you feel a lot better, not like, and it's not just that your business will work better, but you'll feel a little better too.

Awesome. I love it. Well, folks, quick reminder. One, buy the book Power Pull. Like, if you haven't done it already, I'll just keep saying, because I think it's worth it. Two, I'll put my email, rc@reframeb2b.com, in the show notes. If there's something that's on your mind that you are, especially if you are actively doing it, if you're like, boy, I'm sick of onboarding every new hire that I have, and I really wish that that were something that I could you know, put them through something, or, you know, I'm actively struggling against this specific thing and I really wish Rob or RC would develop something for that, drop me an email and let's chat about it. And stay tuned in the coming weeks, we'll announce the, you know, next set of experiences and stuff that we'll have for founders and for teams. All right, Rob, with that, why don't we leave it and we'll see everybody next week.